Just days after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, Fr. Andrew Connolly, then the principal of Holy Trinity High School in Hicksville, celebrated Palm Sunday Mass at nearby Holy Family Parish. He preached that day about how the death of Doctor King was “the same as the passion of Jesus Christ.” Connolly recalled that of the thousand parishioners in the hall “approximately three hundred of them got up to leave.” Connolly asked Bishop Kellenberg to reassign him to parish work “or special work in race relations.” Although he confessed to being raised in a casually racist Irish American home, Connolly claimed to have worked hard to overcome his prejudices and to have been involved in civil rights work from his teenage years. He was assigned as associate pastor of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish, in the largely Black community of Wyandanch, and arrived in June 1968 not long after the area had experienced racial rioting.
The tracks of the Long Island Railroad cut Wyandanch in half, cleaving the predominantly white section to the north from the overwhelmingly Black section to the south. Of the 800 to 1000 families who belonged to Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish, only 80 to 90 were Black. Connolly noticed that white residents of the northern section of the parish—an area called Huntington Hills—actually attended Mass at St. Matthew’s Parish in Dix Hills. “The pastor simply let it happen,” Connolly recalled. But when Connolly was named the parish’s administrator in 1972, he announced that parishioners would need his permission to attend Mass in another church. A delegation of the affected parishioners met with Connolly and argued that he was only interested in where they attended Mass because he wanted their money. But he insisted he was only interested in their minds and hearts. “You go up to that church because you don’t want to be here,” he challenged his parishioners, “because of black and poor” people at Miraculous Medal. “I want you to hear the Gospel,” Connolly pleaded. His stipulations, however, went unheeded indicating that even as the ethnic and territorial definitions of the parish increasingly lost their meaning in the suburban Church the racial boundaries that defined Catholic parishes remained.
Postwar suburbanization helped complete the amalgamation of various ethnically inflected forms of Catholicism into one religiously identified body of American Catholicism, a process which had begun as each ethnic group became further removed from the experience of immigration. In the postwar suburbs, laity who had seen themselves as Irish, Polish, or Italian Catholics when they lived in urban ethnic enclaves, came increasingly to see themselves simply as Catholic. Parishes established to serve European immigrants shed their ethnic affiliations and the names of new suburban parishes, the feasts and rituals they observed, and the lay associations that animated them were no longer defined by ethnicity. However, because of suburbia’s deep racial segregation, newly suburbanized Catholics also increasingly identified themselves as white. Loyal support of the nation during wartime, and suburban homeownership in the postwar period, bestowed upon Italian Catholics in particular, status as white Americans which they had frequently been denied in past generations. Despite the best efforts of Church leaders and some lay activists to support civil rights and parish integration, others among the laity sought to maintain residential segregation and defined the boundaries of their parish through racial exclusivity. Meanwhile, suburbia’s comparatively small community of Black Catholics demanded that their Church live up to its teachings on race and racism, and address their unique needs.
From Ethnic Parishes to Suburban Parishes: Race, Racism, and Civil Rights in the Suburban Church
While suburban parishes were no longer marked by their ethnic character, they were still defined by racial difference and suburbanization helped complete the process by which the descendants of European immigrants became white. Federal policies like the GI Bill, FHA financing requirements, and restrictive covenants made it possible for white ethnics to leave urban enclaves and achieve homeownership in ethnically heterogeneous suburbs, a powerful proof of their inclusion in mainstream white society. But these same policies also excluded Black Americans, ensuring that the suburbs, and therefore the suburban parish, were highly segregated racially. Long Island’s postwar development was thus marked by large swaths of all-white communities with only a smattering of “minority pockets,” where Black veterans and their families could settle, including Wyandanch, North Amityville, Hempstead, Freeport, and Roosevelt. As late as 1990, two-thirds of Long Island’s neighborhoods were less than one percent Black and half had no Black residents at all, making Long Island the fifteenth most segregated metropolitan area in the United States.
The liberal Catholic urbanists and commentators who celebrated the break-up of the ethnic parish, but fretted over the ill effects of suburbanization, never centered white racism in their critiques of suburbia. But they judged that suburbanites had fled the city to absolve themselves of their obligation to serve the needs of urban minorities, and they saw in the civil rights movement an opportunity to advance both a more metropolitan view of the city and the Second Vatican Council’s vision for the Church. Dennis Geaney, for example, wrote that Catholic suburbanites were “not concerned with the race problem” and that they had moved “to the suburbs in flight from it.”
As Fr. Andrew Conolly’s experience at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish in Wyandanch proved, even in areas where Black and white Catholic suburbanites lived within the same territorial parish, some white Catholics chose the church at which they attended Sunday Mass by virtue of its racial exclusivity. After its establishment in 1936, territory had twice been broken off of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal’s original 28 square mile territory to establish new parishes: Saints Cyril and Methodius Parish in Deer Park in 1956, and Our Lady of Grace Parish in West Babylon in 1962. That left 800 families in Our Lady of Miraculous Medal and in 1968 there was a rumor in Wyandanch that another parish would be created from the northern, and mainly white, section of the parish. This would “clearly make the Wyandanch parish a Negro mission,” worried Andy Wills, president of OLMM’s Holy Name Society. “What’s really sad is that this is the way most of the white Catholics want it,” lamented Mrs. Frank Faivre, another parishioner of OLMM. “Some of my neighbors thought I was crazy to join the Wyandanch Mother’s Club,” she said; “they said they wouldn’t come into Wyandanch. They go elsewhere.”
Despite suburbia’s stark racial segregation and examples of Catholic racism, there are also numerous examples of suburban laity and clergy being active in civil rights issues. In 1962, five years after the Diocese of Rockville Centre was established, Bishop Walter Kellenberg formed the Catholic Interracial Council of Long Island to encourage collaboration between the races in an effort to combat racism. With the Council still in its infancy, in August 1963, it organized as many as 100 members, including three seminarians and the diocesan vocation director, to join thousands of other Catholics from around the nation in the March on Washington. Mrs. Althea Gardiner of St. Brigid’s Parish in Westbury, a member of the Interracial Council and the NAACP, felt that “the wonderful success of the March” showed how all people “could stand together, without bitterness, without hatred, and a spirit of brotherhood.” And Mr. Thomas Green of West Hempstead stated that “the demonstration gave tremendous meaning” to his faith, and gave him “more spiritual satisfaction” than any “rosary or candlelight service.”
Within months of the March, the Council hosted a meeting of over 400 priests and lay leaders from 119 parishes in the diocese to suggest what concrete actions Catholics on Long Island could take “to further interracial justice and understanding.” In addition to examining “personal prejudices,” the Council encouraged every parish to “establish a committee on housing to stem panic and educate people about real estate values.” At its founding, the Council’s director, Fr. Francis B. Concannon, had decried the “un-Christ-like racial attitudes, prejudice and misunderstanding” that made “it difficult for members of minority groups to achieve the family betterment” that whites had sought in moving to the suburbs. “No man has the right to expect to retain a racially restricted neighborhood,” argued Dennis J. Clark, the Council’s executive secretary. Calling open housing a moral issue, the Council worked to disabuse white homeowners of the belief that property values declined when minorities moved into previously all-white neighborhoods. Meeting participants also proposed home visitation programs as a means of improving both personal contact between Black and white residents and urban-suburban partnerships. And they suggested that all teachers in the diocese’s parochial schools attend a course on Black history and culture and interracial justice. These recommendations, focusing on housing, interracial understanding, and education in schools, proved to shape the priorities of the Interracial Council over the following decades.
Most pressingly, when Black families attempting to integrate white neighborhoods were met with racist intimidation and violence, the Catholic Interracial Council, pastors, parishioners, and the diocesan bishop denounced racism and organized support for the victims. In September 1970, Mr. and Mrs. Willy Early were building a $40,000 custom home in all-white Massapequa Gardens when vandals painted hate slogans on the home’s foundation and later smashed out all the newly installed windows. Although the Earlys were Lutheran, the area was heavily Catholic, so Mrs. Barbara Roethel of the Nassau County Human Rights Commission—and herself a parishioner of Corpus Christi Parish in Mineola—contacted Newsday and the Long Island Catholic and asked the Catholic Interracial Council to investigate. The priests at St. Rose of Lima Parish preached about the moral implications of the attack and wrote in the Sunday bulletin that “we as a parish deplore racial bigotry.” The parish council then wrote letters of support to the Earlys and to the homebuilder who had agreed to work with them, and parishioners participated in a rally at the property. Msgr. Michael J. McLauglin of the Interracial Council applauded the priests and parishioners’ efforts and the Earlys called the community support “very encouraging.”
Although few if any parishes established housing committees to address racial integration’s effects on property values, the Interracial Council sponsored its own events to discuss open housing and, in 1965, cooperated with the President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Housing to host the nation’s first Suburban Fair Housing Conference. The Council’s efforts met with at least some success when, in 1968, parishioners of St. Aidan’s Parish in Williston Park published a fair housing manifesto in their parish bulletin. “We don’t want to attempt to preserve our community as a ‘Christian one’ or ‘white one,’” the notice stated, “we just want nice people, no matter what their religion or color of skin.” Noting that Catholics of Irish, Italian, and Polish descent knew well the ill effects of racial and religious double-standards, the statement warned real estate agents not to accept racist listings and threatened: “Do what is right and you will prosper. Do what is wrong and we’ll try to put you out of business.” Not all of Long Island’s Catholics were converted. Noting that New York State had laws preventing discrimination in housing sales, one letter-writer to the Long Island Catholic called St. Aidan’s manifesto “sanctimonious” and their threat “rather reminiscent of the lynch mobs.” And at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Valley Stream, where many parishioners had fled racial change in Brooklyn and “were determined that they were not going to move again,” the pastor Msgr. Edmond Trench jokingly referred to the Belt Parkway as the Maginot Line: “we had our guns trained to keep the people in Queens in Queens,” he said.
The Interracial Council also sponsored home visitation days in which Black and white families met and got to know one another in each other’s homes. Mrs. Kathryn Rowcroft helped launch the program with three other women shortly after moving into Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Malverne. “I’m impatient and sick over discrimination,” she said. “You reach a point where, by virtue of your silence, people think you agree with their prejudices. . . . I decided to let everyone know quietly and nicely where we stood on the racial question.” The Nassau County program was so successful that Council members in Suffolk County worked to establish an ecumenical Friendship Sunday on the same model.
In order to inculcate the Church’s teachings on racial justice in younger generations, the Interracial Council worked with the diocese’s high schools, including St. Pius X Seminary in Uniondale and Chaminade High School in Mineola, to form junior chapters of the Council. Members organized panel discussions and book clubs for their fellow students and volunteered to tutor Black elementary school students among other activities. In the wake of the racial riots that had gripped the nation in 1967 and 1968, the Council also worked with the diocesan superintendent of schools to introduce Catholic school principals and teachers to Black history and culture, and to assist them in implementing such lessons in their classrooms. A mandatory, four-week teacher workshop called Re-Education for Mutual Acceptance in the Rockville Centre Diocese (REMARC) was the long-time vision of Mrs. Betty Coles, the Catholic Interracial Council’s education chair and a public-school educator, and was believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.
The following year, the Council collaborated with the Long Island Catholic newspaper and the diocesan Department of Education to produce a seventeen-week series of bi-weekly articles on Black history which shed light on the current plight of Black Americans. Written by Leroy L. Ramsey, a professor of Black history at Hofstra University and a member of the faculty at Plainview High School, the articles were used as part of a mandatory curriculum in the diocese’s seventh and eighth grade classrooms. Fr. Paul E. McKeever, the editor of the Long Island Catholic, expressed hope that parents, too, would read the first-of-its-kind series to “correct their own thinking” and to “eliminate the misconceptions, fears, myths, and stereotypes” that plagued interracial relations. The Long Island Catholic proudly reported that public schools, universities, public libraries, and the Nassau County Historical Museum all requested the articles for use in their own programs, and teachers in diocesan parochial schools “expressed their enthusiasm for the program.” Nearly ninety percent of the diocese’s schools reported incorporating the articles into their curricula and principals reported that parental “opposition to the program had been considerably less than expected.” Indeed, the newspaper series was deemed so successful that, with financial support from Long Island Lighting Company, the diocesan educational television station produced a Black history television series entitled “Four Hundred Years,” which was also made available to all interested public schools.
Despite these concerted efforts, members of the Interracial Council consistently doubted the effect they were having and were critical of the interracial commitment of the diocese, its priests, and people. In 1969, just eighteen months after Bishop Kellenberg had released a major statement on racial issues, members of the Council had largely negative evaluations of the diocese’s response. Msgr. McLaughlin assessed that work was proceeding “as well as could be expected,” and Jean Dember, a Black member of the newly formed Diocesan Interracial Affairs Commission, said that its early discussions were “beyond my hopes.” But Mrs. Betty Coles, then president of the Catholic Interracial Council, saw no improvement in the coordination of the diocese’s interracial efforts. Coles had stated that when she moved to Long Island in 1956, she was “shocked at the prejudice and discrimination” she found, which she thought was “as bad, if not worse” than what she had experienced in the Deep South.” Over a decade later, she said, there was a “lack of interest on the part of a large percentage of the clergy and laity,” and lamented that the people tapped to lead diocesan “agencies and programs dealing with race” had “no knowledge, no expertise” on the problems of the day. Fr. Lawrence E. Lucas, a Black priest from Harlem, told the Catholic Interracial Council that such organizations had served their purpose in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, but that they were “performing no real function in the ‘70s.”
By the time the Council celebrated its tenth anniversary in 1973, the Watergate scandal, the war in Vietnam, and debates over the legality of abortion had come to center stage. The Council’s then-president Mr. John Walsh acknowledged that membership in the CIC had peaked in the mid-1960s at about 400 but was down to just “50 or 60 active people,” and that the home visits program with which the Council had begun, “served a purpose at the time” but had “died out” long ago. He attributed the waning interest in the Council’s activities to a general public apathy, in which people were “withdrawing from reality, staying home, watching TV.” By the early 1980s, a Council-sponsored discussion on “Racism in Suffolk County,” attracted just twenty-five people. Fr. Andrew Connolly cited this as proof that “people think that there is no longer a problem of racism” despite the fact that “there is a prejudice in most white people.” Just a few years earlier, Connolly had critiqued the diocesan presbyterate, suggesting that there were no more than “ten priests in this diocese that are seriously concerned about race.”
Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish and Affordable Housing in Wyandanch
As civil rights institutions like the Interracial Council were waning in the late 1960s, activists’ attention turned to community organizing to address poverty and systemic inequalities. Fr. Andrew Connolly’s work at Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish in Wyandanch is indicative of this shift in emphasis and revelatory of the centrality of grassroots efforts on the parish level in the Church’s attempt to address matters of race and ethnicity, poverty and justice.
Wyandanch is an unincorporated area in Suffolk County’s Town of Babylon. After World War II, the relatively inexpensive housing in the already “somewhat integrated” area drew an influx of middle-class African Americans who found work in nearby state hospitals and military industries. As Fr. Stephen A. Cuddeback, the founding pastor of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish, recalled, the residents of Wyandanch “wanted to keep the area ‘countried,’” however, and opposed the expansion of industry. As a result, Wyandanch lacked job opportunities and had the highest tax rate in the Town of Babylon. As white residents began to move out of Wyandanch, poorer Blacks moved in. Wyandanch’s population did not reach 6,000 until 1960, but by 1968 the population had nearly doubled to approximately 11,000 and the Black population increased by 90 percent.
Overtaxed and under-resourced, Wyandanch seemed poised for the kind of social unrest plaguing America’s cities in the late 1960s. Indeed, in August 1967 violence broke out in Wyandanch as groups of Black young adults smashed windows, overturned cars, set fire to a school auditorium, a VFW Post, and an ambulance garage, and hurled bottles and rocks at police and firefighters. The Long Island Catholic provided very limited coverage of the riots that consumed the nation’s urban areas, and made almost no mention of racial disturbances that occurred across Long Island. But the summer after the riots in Wyandanch, the newspaper launched a lengthy series of investigative reports into conditions in the community. “The forces trying to keep Wyandanch cool this summer are not getting the support they need,” one young resident worried. Another, Mrs. Betty Wilds, summarized Wyandanch’s needs: “We need more shopping areas, better transportation, more jobs, an ambulance that can be used, better health care, more parks that look like parks and not overgrown lots.” But the investigative reporters saw few resources the community could marshal to address these needs. “Like other communities on Long Island,” they assessed, Wyandanch “has little or no sense of community, no self-government, no real identity, and no central institution to call its own.”
The Long Island Catholic was especially concerned with the role religion was playing in Wyandanch’s confrontation with “race and poverty problems.” The investigation showed that various denominations, and several Catholic organizations, were working to improve social services in the area. The St. Vincent de Paul Society opened a thrift store, sixty students from Holy Family Diocesan High School began a tutoring program, the diocese started a pre-school program at Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish, and Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip collaborated with the Suffolk County Health Department to establish a health clinic in the community. But the reporters’ overall evaluation was that religion had “generally failed in Wyandanch,” that the churches had been “too parochial,” and they had “misread the signs of the times.” Citing Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, the editors called for the churches to develop an awareness of the conditions that had created the ghetto and to “join together,” ecumenically, to solve Wyandanch’s “social and moral problems.”
Black residents, too, said that church communities had not been sufficiently active participants in improving Wyandanch. Fr. John B. Hull, the administrator of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish, admitted this was “an unfortunate but valid impression.” The majority of the parish’s 1000 families were white and were not “malicious or hostile,” he said, but lived on the perimeter of Wyandanch and were “not sensitive” to the needs of poorer Black residents. Fr. Andrew Connolly, then the associate pastor, had hoped for some activism from the parish council but, he bemoaned, “we’ve done nothing.” In fact, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish was already beginning to address some immediate needs by paying the rent of a local cooperative grocery store, purchasing a station wagon for the Community Action Center, and lending the parish hall for various community gatherings including school board and scout troop meetings. And in the following years, the parish would work to address one of the area’s most persistent long-term problems: the need for affordable housing. Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish was one of the founding members of the Wyandanch Community Development Corp. which received a $25,000 grant from the Suffolk County Development Corp. for surveys and a master housing plan for Wyandanch.
After several years’ planning, the development corporation proposed the building of low-income housing consisting of 182 townhouses and apartments, ranging from one-room efficiencies to five-bedroom units. The complex was planned to house 692 people with ten percent of the units going to senior citizens, twenty percent to low-income families, and seventy percent to moderate-income families. To be built by a private developer, the project was to receive mortgage assistance from the state Urban Development Corporation and contain its own sewage treatment plant, laundry facilities, community meeting rooms, and recreation areas.
The Commonwealth Housing Proposal, as the project was called, garnered support from the Island’s religious leaders, including the Chief Pastor of the Lutheran Church on Long Island. In June 1973, Bishop Walter Kellenberg wrote a public letter to Fr. Connolly, by then the administrator of Our Lady of Miraculous Medal and secretary of the Wyandanch Community Development Corporation. Kellenberg called housing “the most critical problem on Long Island,” and praising the proposal’s “careful planning and close coordination with the Babylon Town Board.”
The project’s opponents, however, compelled the state legislature to strip the Urban Development Corporation’s power to override local zoning laws, which left the proposal’s fate in the hands of the Babylon Town Board. The “hastily-formed” Babylon Citizens for Home Rule, and the Wheatley Heights Civic Association, among other groups, warned that the housing development would raise taxes and overcrowd schools. The Long Island Catholic decried these arguments as scare-tactics, seeing in their opposition “the ugly spectre of racial bigotry.” But the Babylon Town Board voted down the proposal arguing, among other things, that single-family homes on the site would generate more tax revenue, that the development would draw more welfare families to Wyandanch, and that so many young families with children would overburden the school district.
A Long Island Catholic editorial called the rejection of the proposal a “disappointment” and judged that the stated reasons for the decision did not “hold up under scrutiny.” Having rejected a grassroots approach, in which Black residents tried to “solve their own problems,” the editors said it was now “incumbent on the board to develop its own plan” to solve a housing crisis that would only get worse. In fact, over the following decade, few low-income housing projects met any success on Long Island. The affordable housing crisis became so acute in the 1980s that an estimated 90,000 illegal apartments were created in the basements and attics of the Island’s single-family homes—an illegal market that accounted for one-third of the entire rental market.
Black Catholics in Suburbia
Although Wyandanch was one of the larger African American communities on Long Island, Our Lady of Miraculous Medal Parish had only had 80 to 90 registered Black families. This highlights the fact that, throughout the postwar period, the number of Black Catholics in Nassau and Suffolk Counties remained small, and they were dispersed throughout Long Island, hampering community-building and the diocese’s attempts at ministry to this distinct group. As late as 1980, there were thought to be between 7,500 and 8,000 Black Catholics in the diocese out of a Catholic population of 1.2 million. Mrs. Barbara Horsham-Brathwaite, who would serve as director of the diocesan ministry for Black Catholics, recalled attending Mass for years at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Malverne before she met another Black parishioner. “There are so many Masses here on Long Island,” she said, “you could go back and forth and never meet everyone in the parish.”
In 1980, the Long Island Catholic printed a three-part series on the experiences of Black Catholics in the diocese and on their contribution to the local Church. The series revealed both Black Catholics’ continued experience of racism in the Church and their sense that things had greatly improved. Interviews reflected praise for individual parishes, critiques of the diocese’s overall effort to engage Black Catholics, and decidedly mixed opinions about one of the Church’s most important ministries: the parochial school.
Mrs. Horsham-Brithwaite, herself a product of Catholic schooling, celebrated that “the Catholic church has been the easiest, private school system for black people to be educated in,” but felt that her urban Catholic school had not prepared her for “communities in the suburbs where people were not used to seeing” Black Catholics. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel and Marie Watson of Roosevelt were converts from the Baptist denomination, regular volunteers with Marriage Encounter, and their son, Joseph, was the only Black student at St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary in Uniondale. “Everywhere we go people are surprised that black Catholics exist. The days of overt racism are over,” they said, and yet they still felt they experienced racism every day and that the Church needed to become “more sensitized to the cultural aspects of black people.”
Mr. Charles Burns of Lakeview, a retired Nassau County detective, had a son at Chaminade High School in Mineola and a daughter at St. Agnes High School in Rockville Centre. But his three older children had attended public schools because, at the time, the Catholic schools would not admit them. “I guess they felt the parishioners weren’t ready,” Burns said. “I’m not bitter about it. It was not the time for it. It should have been . . . but in 25 years the Church has become more open to blacks. The Church has come a long way. I feel the Church has grown in every way,” he said. However, Mercedes Smallwood of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish in Wyandanch complained: “I don’t feel the Church cares about me. OLMM Parish does and the priests do” but “I don’t find love in the Catholic Church.” As a member of the Black Catholic Lay Caucus, Smallwood had compiled a list of grievances against the diocese including that CCD materials contained stereotyped caricatures of Black people, and that there were insufficient Black teachers in parish schools. “I'm against Catholic schools,” she said. They are places where “whites send their kids . . . because they want to get them away from blacks. You get a better religious education . . . in CCD programs,” she argued. Mrs. Sandra Thomas of Wheatley Heights, a social worker and parishioner of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Parish in Wyandanch, also praised her parish as “the most unique church” she had ever attended, with “a cross section of wealth and nationalities,” and a “nice, warm feeling.” But she, too, felt the Church as a whole had “failed to recognize” Black Catholics and rarely mentioned Black saints. The Church “does a lot for the poor,” she said, but “helps quietly,” and needs instead to “come out as a frontrunner.”
The following year, in 1981, the diocese established a new Office of Ministry for Black Catholics to increase the opportunities for Black lay leadership, to foster religious and priestly vocations among young Black Catholics, and to improve the whole Church’s understanding of Black history and culture. Mr. Vincent F.A. Golphin, the office’s founding director, stressed that Black Catholics tended to be scattered across parishes and therefore lacked “unifying forces.” But he hoped that since Black Americans were “anxious to secure the advantages of Catholic education for their children,” parochial schools might be a way for the diocese to “become a rapid agent for evolution within the black community.”
EDITORIAL NOTE: Reprinted with permission from Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America by Stephen M. Koeth, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago.
